Mark Chaukier welcome back to the realignment.

Everyone, happy Friday.

We're going to close out this week's programming daily episodes on Ukraine confidently on with an episode about India.

I'm speaking with my Hudson Institute colleague, Dr. Aparna Pandey.

She's the Director of Hudson Institute's initiative on the future of India and South Asia.

This conversation is happening because so many different debates and issues in the Ukraine conflict have revolved around a multi-polar world,

a world where the United States and the West cannot simply call the shots.

And if you're looking at how Russia even China articulates this conflict, they make clear that the future of the world order is determined by a world where countries have much more autonomy when it comes to making their decisions.

One of those countries is India.

How India handles the Ukraine conflict, how India handles its rivalry with China, how it handles positioning in the US and the Indo-Pacific.

All of this comes together, so it's a real privilege to speak with Dr. Pandey on all these issues.

Lots of great stuff here.

If you want to learn more about any specific topics and deep dives, be sure to let us know in the comments and of course give us any feedback you need.

Once again, we're going to do one last week of this upcoming week on these Ukraine topics and we'll get back to our regular programming after that.

So, hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Aparna Pandey, welcome to the realignment.

Thank you so much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

We're going to try to cover as much as possible when it comes to India's foreign policy, but as is clear from both of your books so much, we're too much recent books so much of this conversation is frankly going into thousands of years of history of anything.

Therefore, we're not going to perfectly able to cover everything, but just really want to give an introduction here.

So, let's start with the most basic and zoomed into the news here. How would you describe India's foreign policy positioning and decisions in the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

So, to understand India's reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to understand India's relations with with Russia, which go back to the India's historical relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

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